Kaufman Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
Naoki Sakai (Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, Cornell University)
Translation is a social process in which non-sense is somewhat rendered sensible, discontinuity is smoothed out into continuity. But translation can also be represented spatially as a bridging between two heterogeneous domains, thereby creating the figures of distinctive languages or cultures. This is why, as translation was established as a cognitive regime, modern national languages were distinguished from one another – Italian from Spanish, Dutch from German, Korean from Japanese – and shaped as unique unities. Translation therefore is not only a social action about an already existent border but also a drawing and erecting of a border. In this sense, translation points to the locale of bordering; it overcomes the separation induced by a border while instituting that border itself. As an institution of academic discipline, East Asian Studies has been very much dependent upon the reification of bordering in terms of the West and the Rest or humanitas and anthropos. In this lecture Professor Naoki Sakai will explore some historical ramifications in the contemporary history of the bordering of the West from the Rest, by referring to the Japanese reaction to the issues of Comfort Women, and then go on to discuss the problem of nationality in postcolonial contexts against the backdrop of the ongoing disciplinary transformation in East Asian Studies. Sakai's lecture will seek ways to revitalize the academic study of East Asia since the old protocols of area studies have lost intellectual legitimacy.
Naoki Sakai teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies and is a member of the graduate field of History at Cornell University. He has published in a number of languages in the fields of comparative literature, intellectual history, translation studies, the studies of racism and nationalism, and the histories of semiotic and literary multitude - speech, writing, corporeal expressions, calligraphic regimes, and phonographic traditions. He has led the project of TRACES, a multilingual series in four languages - Korean, Chinese, English, and Japanese (German, Italian, and Spanish will be added in 2008) - whose editorial office is located at Cornell, and served as its founding senior editor (1996 - 2004). In addition to TRACES, Sakai serves as a member of the following editorial boards, positions east asia cultural critique (in the United States), Post-colonial studies (in Australia), Tamkang Review (in Taiwan), International Dictionary of Intellectual History (Britain and Germany), Modern Japanese Cultural History (Japan), ASPECTS (South Korea) and Multitudes (in France). Sakai also serves as an Advisory Board member for The Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM).
